Monday, May 25, 2015

A modest proposal to free Jesus from the prison of the corporations

Several times in this space, words point to the corporate nature of the
Christian church, especially in the United States, and to a lesser extent in
Canada. Diocesan visions and charges that urge an increase in numbers by 10%
and in dollar revenue by 15% were called “General Motors religion,” in the firm
conviction that a similar statement could and would be made to the troops by
whomever happened to be the CEO of that corporation at an annual shareholders’
and upper level executives’ meeting. From my youth, I recall with disdain the
words of a young evangelist from Ireland, subtly announcing an open-air Sunday
evening service on the town dock, ‘to grow the business’ of the church. I
actually thought then and firmly believed that business for profit was something
to be kept separate from whatever was the purpose and meaning of the church, as
it was not based on either profit or numbers. How naive! And then there was the
considerable celebration when one of the most wealthy businessmen in the town
donated a new carillon chime to the church to be broadcasting tunes of hymns
every day at 5:00 p.m. as another aspect of the growing business. Money in the
service of religious marketing seemed somewhat unseemly, but who was I as a
teenager to protest the decisions of the adult leaders? And of course, pews
filled with bottoms were another obvious sign that God was doing God’s work in
that church, padding the resume of the evangelist, and transforming his career
into one of the travelling preachers attempting to fill other churches with the
power of his charisma and accompanying rhetoric. The fine print of his bigotry,
Roman Catholic contempt and hatred, along with his addiction to perfection in
forbidding his spouse from even preparing meals on Sunday were ignored in his
press releases.

Later, I found myself training in churches whose trust account boasted,
in one case half a million dollars, and in another one million dollars, while
immediately adjacent to these sanctuaries, people were literally starving,
homeless and destitute. I did not hear a single word from either of two
seminaries in the business of training clergy about what I considered the
hypocrisy of those trust accounts. Could not a portion of those reserves have
been spent relieving the pain of those in dire need right in front of the eyes
of the people in the pews? Instead, much time inside the parish was dedicated
to discussions about the place of the gays and lesbians and transgenders in the
church. Were they welcome as parishioners? Were they elegible to serve as
clergy? How arcane and antiseptic those discussions now seem, especially in
light of the ice-age movement of the church in the direction of inclusion.

Clearly, reaching out to the dispossessed was not nearly as important
as maintaining those trust accounts.

Having wondered if the “corporate” church was a recent or historic
feature of the north American religious tradition, I was startled to read a
headline and a report on an essay on how the corporate church emerged following
the Great Depression in a recent edition of Salon. Here is an excerpt from that
piece:

Politics and religion have always made uneasy bedfellows, but there was
a definitive shift in America’s political and religious culture in the 1940s
that set Christianity on its current course. As historian Kevin Kruse notes in
a recent essay, it was during this period
that Christian America was co-opted by corporate America. Following the Great
Depression, Big Business had something of an image problem, and needed
rebranding. Also problematic was FDR’s New Deal, which was indispensable to the
middle class but anathema to corporate interests.

Industrialists realized, Kruse writes, that, “As men of God, ministers
could voice the same conservative complaints as business leaders, but without
any suspicion that they were motivated by self-interest.” Kruse goes on to
explain how religious authorities were recruited by business leaders: “It was a
watershed moment – the beginning of a movement that would advance over the
1940s and early 1950s a new blend of conservative religion, economics, and
politics that one observer aptly anointed Christian libertarianism.” Under the
guise of this ideology, American clergy began to demonize the state:
individualism was exalted; secularism was synonymous with socialism; and
collectivism became the preferred boogeyman of businessmen and Christians. In short,
capitalists purchased the pulpits of preachers, who equated economic freedom
with spiritual salvation, God with limited government.

This alliance paved the way for the prosperity gospel, a preposterous
doctrine according to which godliness and wealth are one and the same. Although
the prosperity gospel emerged in the late 1940s as an independent Pentecostal
movement, it aligned perfectly with the free market theology of Christian
libertarianism. (Jesus is a political prisoner: An American
history of Christianity’s corruption by Sean Illing, Salon, May
24, 2015)

Of course, it takes money to pay the heating
and building maintenance bills, not to mention pay the salary of the clergy,
organist and custodians. Or course, without people in the pews, writing cheques
or dropping cash into envelopes, there is no church. And of course, the model
of decision-making that attaches to the corporate/political world would also be
adopted by the people who “lead” the church, including even in some cases, the
supreme power and leadership of a single individual, as exemplified by the
Vatican.Historically, we know that
there was a time when ordinary people did not read, and theologians were
charged with interpreting scripture for them. As reading became accessible to
all, that “power” and “authority” dissipated in favour of multiple
interpretations, the reformation and the many religious conflicts that ensued.

The real corruption of the church by the corporate
model includes:

·political
imprisonment of Jesus to the money-bags of the church,

·the
preoccupation with making money, and the marketing tricks that attend to that
goal,

·ignoring the spiritual growth of the people in the
pews and in the pulpit.

·Appearances trump deeper and often darker realities,
in the lives of both the institution and the individuals who gather both among
leadership and laity.

·Extrinsics trump intrinsics and the political trumps
the spiritual.

·authority and power and a top-down military structure
and method of dealing with crises based on the corporate model of reducing
costs and eliminating public embarrassment of the institution, not one of
constructive reconciliation, has supplanted the real mission and purpose of the
Christian church and faith.

Business can and does ‘get away’ with
attending to the extrinsic matters of organizations: sales, production costs,
marketing, investment accounts, corporate culture, relations to government and
other corporate entities. Churches, on the other hand, (it says here) have a
much more important responsibility, the spiritual lives of those who select
them, and the healing of both the community’s fractures and wounds, and the
spiritual pain of their parishioners. Also, when investments trump real active
ministry, that is the kind of ministry that does not merely seek converts in
some magical, once-in-a-lifetime rebirth, but rather welcomes the least likely
to be welcomed, the least able to write cheques, the least able to serve as a
social magnet to attract others “well-to-do” to the pews, then we all know,
including the bishops, and the archbishops, the canons and the archdeacons that
churches risk compromising the essence of their faith in the pursuit of what
they consider normal, the corporate model of organization.

As told and re-told in both gospels and
throughout history, Jesus overturned the tables of the money-changers in angry
disgust.

·Who and where are the church leaders with the faith
and the courage mounted on that faith willing to challenge the corporate model
of the church?

·Who are those willing to suffer the consequences of
rebelling against the corporate model of “growth” in numbers of dollars and
bums in pews?

·Where are the rebels whose vision of a faith community
is much more complex that rituals over an altar, rituals at a baptismal font,
rituals over coffins and weddings, and the occasional pot-luck meal?

It is not only the Irish Archbishop who needs
to be calling this weekend’s 62% vote in favour of mixed marriage, a call
requiring a reality check. And the swamping of the church withmoney and the pursuit of money is not the
only table that needs overturning. The seminaries and faculties of theology
need to shift much of their emphasis from liturgy to conflict resolution, to
reconciliation, to mediation and to collaborative decision making, no longer
relying on the democratic model of decision making. It is not that long ago
that those preparing for priesthood, at least in the Anglican church, spent up
to twenty hours learning what the students sarcastically dubbed “holy
hand-waving” and literally not a single minute of class or after class time
learning the details and intricacies of conflict resolution even though all the
curriculum designers in those faculties knew that parishes are rife with
conflict, and have few if any resources to heal the hurts and mend the wounds.

There has been considerable valuable work
done in hospitals and religious departments in the field of pastoral education,
helping mature adults to thaw their frozen hearts, minds and habits from the
fossils that may have served them on their way to career/corporate/wealth
success. Clergy fortunate enough to have taken the opportunities for these
learnings, if freed from the strict requirements of their chosen denomination,
could and would provide a very different model of experiencing a faith
community, that would open hearts, minds, and especially spirits to the wonder
of creation, including their own beings, as children of God.

How the linen is foldedby the altar guild would no longer be a
matter of social acceptance or contempt, as it has been for decades, if not
centuries. Whether one prayer book is used in a service or another would never
be permitted to serve to divide a faith community. Whether gays and lesbians
and transgenders are permitted both to celebrate and to worship would no longer
be a matter of more division, nor would a woman’s right to choose.

The words of scripture, also, cannot and must
not be used as self-righteous bullets of scorn and contempt by those
literalists in seminaries and also in parishes, to condemn those who hold a
more liberal view, and those who are uncertain of the absolute meaning of
contentious verses.

Every organization has what have become known
as gatekeepers, those people who consider it their right and duty to keep those
“undesirables” out of the literal or metaphoric sanctuary of the organization.
Corporations impose strict screening on their executives. Churches also mimmick
this perfectionism, in a highly unsuccessful manner if so no other reason that
perfectionism itself is not sustainable. And to attempt to achieve it, or to
pretend to achieve some kind of moral purity is nothing less than deception and
denial: the former to the wider public and the latter to the inner leadership.
Purity of dogma, blessed by the presence of only those who either blindly
concur or who are unwilling to question, is a short and guaranteed route to
both infantilism and intellectual rigidity even morbidity. And that is a path
that no faith promising life and life “more abundant” can either tolerate or
foster.

Just as government,if it seeks to offer protection and security
and support to its people cannot be modelled on the corporate for-profit business
model, nor can universities, hospitals, libraries and churches. And those who
succumb to the conventional ‘wisdom’ that they can and must, are living in a
state of denial, failing in their legitimate responsibilities and also
perpetuating a colossal lie.

We thank Sean Illing for his historic
research, and posit that much more scholarship can and will be extended to
provoke a real transformation away from the pursuit and collection of money as
the prime purpose of the Christian church.